Wednesday, 10 July 2013

Lately, i've been working in one of the oldest dedicated photo-archives in the UK, if not the world. Part of my job within this particular archive (which shall remain nameless for reasons that will soon be apparent) is to sort the proverbial 'wheat from chaff' regarding anything that did not pertain directly to the history of the organisation in question. Upon doing this I duly discovered an entire shelf full of photo albums dating anywhere between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s that had nothing to do with the company in question. Questioning this, I was told that one of the previous archivists had had the bright idea to turn said archive into a picture library for British Social History sometime in the mid-1990s and had sequestered donations through national papers and magazines. The result that I had before me was the total result of all the donations and only a few were relatable to the organisation, which meant that I was free to either take them or chuck them. Having only very recently set up my online archive of British Social History; www.arkpress.co.uk/ I seized upon these images. Below are a series of what I had before me as I went through the stacks of envelopes.